¹ Peter Laslett, The world we have lost (London, 1965), 14–15:Wall, B; Richard, ‘The age at leaving home’, Journal of Family History 3 (1978), 181–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wrigley, E. A., ‘Reflections on the history of the family ’, Daedalus 106 (1977), 72Google Scholar; K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the labouring poor: social change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), 320–1. As the vast majority of the apprentices in our sample are male, we take the generic apprentice as male in this article.

² Peter Laslett, Family life and illicit love in earlier generations (Cambridge, 1977), 13, 35, 43–6:Hajnal, B; John, ‘Two kinds of preindustrial household formation system’, Population and Development Review 8 (1982), 470–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tine De Moor and Jan Zanden, Luiten Van, ‘Girl power: the European marriage pattern and labour markets in the North Sea region in the late medieval and early modern period’, The Economic History Review 63 (2010), 1–33Google Scholar; Snell, Annals, 320–1. For some apprentices, premiums paid by their parents that covered some of their living costs softened the sharpness of this separation.

³ Robert C. Allen, The British industrial revolution in global perspective (Cambridge, 2009), 16–22; Jan Luiten Van Zanden, The long road to the industrial revolution (Leiden, 2009), 3–5; Jan De Vries, The industrious revolution (Cambridge, 2008), 6–9, 71–2; Gregory Clark, A farewell to alms: a brief economic history of the world (Princeton, 2007), 239–42.

⁴ Olive Dunlop and Richard Denman, English apprenticeship and child labour (London, 1912), 15–18:Mayhew, B; Graham, ‘Life-cycle service and the family unit in early modern Rye’, Continuity and Change 6 (1991), 201–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nicholas, D., ‘Child and adolescent labour in the late medieval city’, English Historical Review 110 (1995), 1106, 1109–10Google Scholar.

⁵ See for example Smith, S. R., ‘The London apprentices as seventeenth-century adolescents’, Past and Present 61 (1973), 149–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and youth in early modern England (New Haven, 1994), 85; Paul Griffiths, Youth and authority: formative experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996), 113–75.

⁶ Wall, , ‘Age at leaving home’; ‘Leaving home and the process of household formation in pre-industrial England’, Continuity and Change 2 (1987), 77–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Leaving home and living alone: an historical perspective’, Population Studies 43 (1989), 369–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more recent populations see Galenson, David, ‘Economic determinants of the age at leaving home’, Social Science History 11 (1987), 355–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar:Guinnane, B; Timothy, ‘Age at leaving home in rural Ireland, 1901–1911’, The Journal of Economic History 52 (1992), 651–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Steckel, Richard, ‘The age at leaving home in the United States, 1850–1860’, Social Science History 20 (1996), 507–32Google Scholar.

⁷ Ann Kussmaul, Servants in husbandry in early modern England (Cambridge, 1981), 70–2.

⁸ Steven Rappaport, Worlds within worlds: structures of life in sixteenth-century London (Cambridge, 1989); Snell, Annals.

⁹ Adults are here taken as males over 24 years old, the age at which people could become citizens. See Schwarz, L., ‘London apprentices in the seventeenth century: some problems’, Local Population Studies 38 (1987), 18–22Google Scholar; C. Minns and P. Wallis, ‘Apprenticeship and skill in eighteenth century England’, paper presented at the World Economic History Congress (Utrecht, 2009), available at http://www.wehc2009.org/programme.asp?day=5&time=10.

¹⁰ P. Wallis and C. Minns, Rules and reality: quantifying the practice of apprenticeship in early modern Europe, LSE economic history working paper 118 (London, 2009).

¹¹ K. Snell, D. M., ‘The apprenticeship system in British history’, History of Education 25 (1996), 303–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jane Humphries, ‘At what cost was preeminence purchased? Child labour and the first industrial revolution’, in Peter Scholliers and Leonard D. Schwarz eds., Experiencing wages: social and cultural aspects of wage forms in Europe since 1500 (New York, 2003), 251–68.

¹² The relationship between an apprenticeship and becoming a journeyman and master varied across Europe. In some regions, a period as a journeyman was obligatory. In others, including England, it was not. See Reinhold Reith, ‘Circulation of skilled labour in late medieval and early modern central Europe’, in S. R. Epstein and M. R. Prak eds., Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2008), 114–42.

¹³ The most recent survey is Bert De Munck and Hugo Soly, ‘ “Learning on the shop floor” in historical perspective’, in B. De Munck, S. L. Kaplan and H. Soly eds., Learning on the shop floor (New York, 2007), 3–34. The effectiveness of apprenticeship regulations is discussed in Wallis, Patrick, ‘Apprenticeship and training in premodern England’, The Journal of Economic History 68 (2008), 832–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Useful overviews include Steven A. Epstein, Wage labor and guilds in medieval Europe (Chapel Hill, 1991), 104–5; Marjatta Rahikainen, Centuries of child labour: European experiences from the seventeenth to the twentieth century (Aldershot, 2004), 5–6.

¹⁵ Davis, N. Z., ‘The reasons of misrule: youth groups and charivaris in sixteenth century France’, Past and Present 50 (1971), 41–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Kaplan, Steven L., ‘L'apprentissage au XVIIIe siècle: le cas de Paris’, Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 40 (1993), 452Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Bert De Munck, Technologies of learning: apprenticeship in Antwerp guilds from the 15th century to the end of the ancien regime (Turnhout, 2007), 178.

¹⁸ De Munck, Technologies of Learning, 177.

¹⁹ Annemarie Steidl, ‘Silk weaver and purse maker apprentices in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Vienna’, in De Munck, Kaplan and Soly eds., Learning on the shop floor, 142; Rahikainen, Centuries, 6.

²⁰ Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, 323–25. See also Dunlop and Denman, English apprenticeship, 134–5, 258–9; William Le Hardy ed., Calendar to the court minute books of the Grocers Company, 1556–1692 (typescript, c. 1930), ii, 326.

²¹ 5 Eliz I, c. 4, para. 326.

²² Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing up in medieval London (New York, 1993), 113.

²³ Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, 295–6.

²⁴ Cited in Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 296–7.

²⁵ Joan Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 1600–1914 (London, 1996), 17; Snell, Annals, 236, 323–31. See also John Rule, Experience of labour in eighteenth-century industry (London, 1981), 97–8:Cunningham, B; Hugh, ‘The employment and unemployment of children in England c. 1680–1851’, Past and Present 126 (1990), 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Alysa Levene, ‘Parish apprenticeship and old poor law London’, The Economic History Review (forthcoming 2010), 10.

²⁷ Horrell, Sara and Humphries, Jane, ‘“The exploitation of little children”: child labor and the family economy in the industrial revolution’, Explorations in Economic History 32 (1995), 485–516CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hugh Cunningham, ‘How many children were “unemployed” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England? Reply', Past and Present 187 (2005), 213. See also Humphries, ‘Child labour’, 254–9; Katrina Honeyman, Child workers in England, 1780–1820 (Aldershot, 2007), 45–7.

²⁸ London Livery Company apprenticeship registers series, abstracted and indexed by Cliff Webb, 48 vols. (London, 1998–2009). Detailed information about the manuscript sources for each company are given in the prefaces to individual volumes and can also be found at http://www.britishorigins.com/. Stationers' Company apprentices are given in Michael Turner, The London book trades – a biographical resource (2007), available at http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/dspace/handle/10065/224.

²⁹ In nearly all cases, the information recorded was for the father (even if deceased), not the mother.

³⁰ Christopher Brooks, ‘Apprenticeship, social mobility and the middling sort, 1550–1800’, in J. Barry and C. W. Brooks eds., The middling sort of people (Basingstoke, 1994), 61–2; Richard Grassby, The business community of seventeenth-century England (Cambridge, 1995), 144–54.

³¹ The companies with restricted samples are: the Bakers, Barbers, Bricklayer, Carpenter, Clockmakers, Clothworkers, Coopers, Goldsmiths, Haberdashers, Joiners, Leathersellers, Mercers, Merchant Taylors, and Weavers.

³² Wareing, John, ‘Changes in the geographical distribution of the recruitment of apprentices to the London companies, 1486–1750’, Journal of Historical Geography 6 (1980), 241–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Minns and Wallis, ‘Apprenticeship and skill’.

³⁴ See http://www.familysearch.org/.

³⁵ See Lee L. Bean, Geraldine Mineau, Katherine A. Lynch and J. Willigan, Dennis, ‘The Genealogical Society of Utah as a data resource for historical demography’, Population Index 46 (1980), 6–19Google Scholar; Dilts, G. D. ‘International genealogical index, 1992 edition’, Genealogists magazine 24 (1993), 294–7Google Scholar.

³⁶ The IGI uses a proprietary algorithm akin to Soundex to address variant spellings in names and the quality of our matches relies on this.

³⁷ These cases are not a major problem and occur infrequently (less than 2 per cent of links), but they do distort means substantially if retained.

³⁸ Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, 295.

³⁹ Ten-year-old apprentices are only 0.51 per cent of our sample; 30 year olds are 0.23 per cent. See Rahikainen, Centuries, 33; Snell, Annals, 328–32; and Rule, Experience, 98.

⁴⁰ Berry, B. M. and Schofield, R. S., ‘Age at baptism in pre-industrial England’, Population Studies 25 (1971), 458CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁴¹ Poole, A., ‘Baptismal delay: some implications from the parish registers of Cranbrook and surrounding parishes in the Kentish Weald’, Local Population Studies 65 (2000), 9–28Google Scholar.

⁴² Minns and Wallis, ‘Rules and reality’.

⁴³ On age and strength see Reinhold Reith, ‘Apprentices in the German and Austrian crafts in early modern times: apprentices as wage earners?’, in De Munck, Kaplan and Soly eds., Learning on the shop floor, 190.

⁴⁴ Snell, Annals, 325–6.

⁴⁵ Snell's sample size is also smaller: only 74 between 1700 and 1760 and 331 over the three periods discussed here, and ages were reported to a different degree of accuracy (or at least of bias), with exams recording age to the half year; see Annals, 323, 326.

⁴⁶ For the sake of comparison, the regions used here are those utilised by Smith and Wareing: Smith, S. R., ‘The social and geographical origins of the London apprentices, 1630–60’, Guildhall Miscellany 4 (1973), 195–206Google Scholar; Wareing, ‘Geographical distribution’, 241–9. We excluded counties with fewer than 50 apprentices, which limits the sample to England (counties excluded: Cornwall, Rutland, Huntingdonshire, Angus, Fife, Glamorganshire, Selkirkshire, Midlothian, Montgomeryshire, Radnorshire, Denbighshire and Flintshire).

⁴⁷ Humphries, ‘Child labour’, 259.

⁴⁸ On pauper apprentices see Pamela Sharpe, ‘Poor children as apprentices in Colyton, 1598–1830’, Continuity and Change (1991), 255–6; Alysa Levene, ‘Pauper apprenticeship and the Old Poor Law in London: feeding the industrial economy?’ (Mimeo, 2009), 10–11; Honeyman, Child workers, 45–6.

⁴⁹ De Munck, Technologies of learning, 177–8.

⁵⁰ This gives a sample size for each company of over 90 in every period.

⁵¹ Unfortunately, detailed apprenticeship records for the Carmen's Company only survive from 1678.

⁵² The PST coding is discussed in E. A. Wrigley, Poverty, progress, and population (Cambridge, 2004), chapters 5, 11.

⁵³ Snell, Annals, 323–4.

⁵⁴ In additional specifications, we experimented with interaction terms for youths from agricultural families (yeoman and farming) in arable and pastoral counties. We found support for Snell's view from arable counties, where apprentices with agricultural fathers had an additional negative age premium, with significant coefficients of about −.025.

⁵⁵ Mayhew, ‘Life-cycle service’, 206, 212–14, 217. See also Wall, ‘Age at leaving home’, 184.

⁵⁶ Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, 296.

⁵⁷ E. A. Wrigley, English population history from family reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge, 1997), 291; John Landers, Death and the metropolis: studies in the demographic history of London, 1670–1830 (Cambridge, 1993), 172.

⁵⁸ Wall, ‘Age at leaving home’, 193.

⁵⁹ Wall, ‘Age at leaving home’; Horrell and Humphries, ‘Exploitation’, 496–9:Humphries, B;, ‘Child labour’, 258. On the decline of child labour see Clark Nardinelli, ‘Child labor and the Factory Acts’, Journal of Economic History 40 (1980), 741–50Google Scholar:Cunningham, B; Hugh, ‘The decline of child labour: labour markets and family economies in Europe and North America since 1830’, Economic History Review 53 (2000), 409–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ Cunningham, ‘Employment’, 131.

⁶¹ Quoted in John Walter, ‘Faces in the crowd: gender and age in the early modern English crowd’, in Helen Berry and Elizabeth A. Foyster eds., The family in early modern England (Cambridge, 2007), 110.

⁶² Walter, ‘Faces’, 105–10.

⁶³ Cf. Rahikainen, Centuries, 12–13, and also Cunningham, ‘Employment’, 118, where childhood is taken as ending at 15.

⁶⁴ Wrigley, E. A., ‘A simple model of London's importance in changing English society and economy, 1650–1750’, Past and Present 37 (1967), 44–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁵ Life expectancy at age 25 was 58.9 in 1780–1789 (Wrigley, English population history, 290). If we assume that apprentices were skilled workers after 7 years of service, then the number of skilled working years, if apprenticeship had started at 17.88 (the median in 1580–1589) would be 34.02 years; if apprenticeship started at 14.77, the skilled career was 37.13 years.

⁶⁶ Jan de Vries, The industrious revolution: consumer behaviour and the household economy, 1650 to the present (Cambridge, 2008).

⁶⁷ Rahikainen, Centuries; Cunningham, ‘Employment’; Kirby, Peter, ‘Debate: how many children were “unemployed” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England?’ Past and Present 187 (2005), 187–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cunningham, ‘How many children?’, 203–15.

⁶⁸ Tim Wales, ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle’, in R. M. Smith ed., Land, kinship and life-cycle (Cambridge, 1984), 376; Rahikainen, Centuries, 53; Kussmaul, Servants, 1981.

⁶⁹ David Levine, Reproducing families: the political economy of English population history (Cambridge, 1987), 120–1; Pat Hudson, ‘Proto-industrialization in England’, in Sheilagh Ogilvie and Markus Cerman eds., European proto-industrialization (Cambridge, 1996), 61–3.

⁷⁰ Horrell and Humphries, ‘Exploitation’, 501.

⁷¹ Wrigley, English population history, 134–5; Smith, Richard M., ‘Fertility, economy, and household formation in England over three centuries’, Population and Development Review 7 (1981), 602–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.